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the evolution of My Day

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As I've discussed earlier on Mac Mojo, software evolves. My Day is no different in that respect. We went through a few design iterations before we got to the version that ships with Office 2008. Let's talk about how we evolved My Day as a result of feedback from our users.

In some of our early designs, we looked at making My Day a widget. The feedback from users was instant and overwhelming: no widget! Users told us that the value of My Day to them is being able to see it all the time so that it helps you keep on task. As a widget, it was too easy to forget that it was there, and so never look at it.

One early design of My Day showed a fixed number of 3 calendar events and 3 tasks, and had a fixed size to match. In our usability studies, users told us that this was too rigid. Some users said that they don't have a lot of meetings, so they wanted to be able to see only their tasks tasks. Other users said that they keep their to-dos in their head or on paper instead of in Entourage, so they only wanted to see calendar events. Our design evolved to default to three of each, but to allow you to change the size of the window and change the size of the individual panes within the window to show you exactly what you need.

Another change made was how we handle the end of the day. Originally, our design had you change the day in My Day to another date if you wanted to see the information there. In usability studies, our users told us that they wanted some idea of what was coming their way tomorrow so that they could plan the next day. So we added a new design: we show you the first calendar event that you have tomorrow so that you know that you need to get in early for that 8am conference call.

We've made a lot of tweaks to My Day to get to what we finally shipped in Office 2008. We've seen some great feedback about it so far, and I'm really excited to see how people are using it in the real world. It's been pretty nifty.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    May 01, 2008
    Hi, I was hoping I could ask you a question.  I use Office 2008 for Mac.  My Day is a great little app, however, I have tried everything short of deleting off my drive to make it stop auto-launching when I boot.  I have unchecked the preference "Open after computer logon" but to no avail. Please help? Using- MacBook Pro Mac OS 10.5.2 Office 2008 Mac Thanks in advance. -tony

  • Anonymous
    May 03, 2008
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    May 05, 2008
    RoseAnn - If you have purchased Microsoft Office 2008, you get two free support calls.  So you don't need to pay for anything, unless you've already used your two support calls.  Alternately, you could go to the Help menu and select "Send feedback about Entourage" to get it to us.   Firefox and My Day shouldn't interact at all.  As I'm sure you can imagine, lots of us here use Firefox all the time, and haven't had any problem like what you're describing.   My Day can get bogged down if you have a LOT of flagged items.  Do you have lots of flagged items (we're talking in the hundreds here)?  If you do, you might want to consider clearing those flags to see if that helps with your My Day speed issue.

  • Anonymous
    December 15, 2008
    A question came up on the You Talk list recently about Tasks. The following was posted by Nadyne Mielke, a user experience researcher for Microsoft. My Day displays your Entourage tasks and calendar events. The default view gives you three calendar events